I wish! 😄 Leading Kansas writes this time in regard to data centers, and about addressing our local governments in our own behalf. It works the same in every state.

He Has Risen

To vote yes

Clay Jones

This cartoon was drawn for the Fredericksburg Advance. But don’t yell at them for it; you can yell at me.

If you live in Virginia, you have been bombarded with flyers about the special election on redistricting. And it’s not just flyers but also TV commercials, which are also popping up online. We are getting these things from both sides.

There is a special election in November on a state constitutional amendment that would give Democrats as many as four seats in Congress. The measure would also temporarily bypass the state’s redistricting commission to redraw maps in the middle of the decade.

The state’s Supreme Court approved the measure to be on the ballot less than a week before early voting began. State Republicans repeatedly tried to stop Democrats from moving forward with the referendum. The irony here is that Republicans claim that voting yes will disenfranchise voters, while they literally tried to keep this off the ballot so people couldn’t vote on it.

This is a direct response to Donald Trump and Republicans redistricting mid-decade to give themselves more seats. Donald Trump even said he was entitled to have more congressional seats. This is one reason why we need to No Kings protest. Donald Trump already believes he’s entitled to win elections he’s lost. (snip-MORE, and it’s on point)

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The Parsons Project

by André Swartley

Leading Kansas

Key points at a glance

• Energy company Deep Fission is in the process of building a new and untested type of underground nuclear reactor in Parsons, KS
• The Trump administration has reduced regulations to encourage nuclear power production
• The reactor will likely power data centers for artificial intelligence
• Large data centers consume huge amounts of water and energy and produce different types of pollution, leading to health risks for nearby residents

In November 2025 a two-year-old energy company called Deep Fission broke ground in Parsons, Kansas. They hope this project will enable them to install the second ever energy producing nuclear reactor in the state, after Wolf Creek, potentially with more reactors on the way in the future. If the early “characterization” drilling goes to plan, they claim the reactor could begin pumping electricity into the grid in the near future.

Parsons is a city of 10,000 in southeastern Kansas, near the Oklahoma border. I’ve lived in Kansas for most of my life and I had not heard of Parsons until last week. So, why is Deep Fission in Parsons, Kansas, and why now? Not coincidentally, the Great Plains Industrial Park, also located in Parsons, has lately been advertised as a prime location for new data centers to power the trillion-dollar (yes, trillion with a T) artificial intelligence boom forced upon us by large technology corporations and their venture capitalist backers. Which means the Parsons nuclear reactor project would likely come as a package with one or more new data centers, along with potential economic prosperity and a host of legitimate concerns that community members have already raised.

Part 2: The New Nuclear Power

While the Department of Energy set a goal for the Parsons reactor to go online in July of this year, Deep Fission themselves are aiming to connect to the grid by 2027 or 2028. Two years is still an unusually rapid rollout for a nuclear power plant, which usually takes 6-10 years from groundbreaking to full operation.

This reduced timeline comes by way of the Trump Administration’s efforts to slow the national and worldwide adoption of renewable energies like wind and solar power. In February of this year alone, Trump’s Department of Energy halted the approval of “168 projects – those that focused on renewable energy projects” while allowing nearly 11,000 other energy projects to proceed as planned, including new nuclear energy projects. Executive Order 14301 in May of 2025 provided Deep Fission with the means to build their experimental nuclear reactor on such a short timetable.

Nuclear energy is typically labeled as “clean” energy compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, meaning that it releases fewer pollutants into the air and water than fossil fuel consumption. Still, there are two main concerns. First is the disposal of nuclear waste, which ranges from the lightly contaminated clothing of plant workers to the lethally radioactive spent fuel a plant produces over time. This latter “accounts for just 3% of the total volume of waste, but contains 95% of the total radioactivity.”

A relatively new method in the US and Europe for disposing of our most dangerous nuclear waste is to bury it very deep underground, so that it can be surrounded by solid rock to provide the same level of pressure containment as required at structure at a surface nuclear reactor facility. The father-daughter team that eventually founded Deep Fission originally created Deep Isolation to dispose of nuclear waste. Deep Fission takes their concept a step further by placing the entire reactor, and therefore its most dangerously radioactive elements, into a borehole drilled one mile underground.

The second main concern related to nuclear energy production is, of course, accidents or attacks. It is true that large-scale nuclear accidents are very rare, but when they happen, they become instant, globally recognized disasters whose names we all know: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima. The effects are so widespread as to be practically impossible to quantify. The reactor explosion and meltdown in Chernobyl, for example, caused several dozen deaths directly related to radiation exposure, but various studies have predicted anywhere from thousands up to a million eventual additional cancer deaths. Not to mention the environmental and economic cost to the entire region around Chernobyl. And radioactive boars still terrorize people and farmland in the region around the Fukushima plant in Japan.

But those issues are known, and regulations have historically attempted to shore up potential dangers posed by new plants. In contrast, nothing like the underground nuclear reactor in Parsons, Kansas has ever been attempted before, and thanks to Executive Order 14301, will not need to go through long established design and testing phases that other types of nuclear reactors have been subject to in the past. John Young, a mining environmental regulatory specialist who lives in Sedgwick County, asks, “Why abandon the current regulatory process for something created out of whole cloth with no public input? And no one can define the current regulatory pathways for Federal and State authorizations.

“What,” Young asks in frustration, “could possibly go wrong?”

Part 3: Data Centers and Artificial Intelligence

So that is a glimpse into the nuclear energy side of things. Next we must address concerns around data centers and artificial intelligence. Data centers come in different sizes, like the smaller center being proposed in Wellington, KS, which would reportedly “use roughly 30% of the city’s electrical capacity while generating an estimated $1.3 million in annual electric utility revenue” while consuming only two gallons of water per day. Larger data centers consume resources less modestly. “Around the country, and the world, there is a land race among the big tech companies for sites for their data centers,” claims a November 2024 investigative report by Rolling Stone. Data centers are much newer than nuclear energy technology, yet the ways in which they harm communities near them have already become apparent.

Water: “Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people,” according to a June 2025 study by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). And data centers built explicitly to power AI represent the fastest growing portion of the market.

Last year, researchers at the University of California, Riverside calculated that ChatGPT—one of several popular Large Language Models (LLMs) vying for marketplace dominance—answered about 10,000 queries per second. The processing load to do so guzzled about 6,000 liters (or about 1,000 toilet flushes) of fresh water per second, all day, every day. That is only generating written text. AI photos require more water, and still more for AI video. “The extraction process is permanent,” explains the University of Alabama at Birmingham Institute for Human Rights. Water used to cool data centers evaporates as it cools hot components, meaning it can no longer be used by people in the region who need water for drinking, cooking, bathing, laundry, and general survival.

Pollution: Unfortunately, it is not only consumption of water to worry about. The evaporation of water cooling data centers leaves behind higher concentrations of nitrates and other contaminants leaked through agricultural fertilizers and pesticides into local water supplies, drastically increasing incidents of “rare cancers, muscle disorders, and miscarriages” among people who live nearby. Geographically, Parsons, Kansas sits atop the Alluvial and Ozark Aquifers.

Reports of noise pollution have increased near data centers as well. Residents in different Virginia towns experienced disturbing high and low frequency humming in a wide radius around two new data centers.

Energy: New York City is the most populous city in the United States. The population consumes about 11 billion watts of electricity per hour. However, by 2030, “power usage of…data centers is projected to rise to nearly 2967 trillion watts an hour,” increasing load and wear on current energy infrastructure and raising energy prices for regular people while tech companies receive sweetheart discounts from local and state institutions.

Gradual Disempowerment: Artificial Intelligence scholars and ethicists have identified a trend they call “gradual disempowerment.” As AI becomes more capable, people will continue to offload, “almost all societal functions, such as economic labor, decision making, artistic creation, and even companionship” to their favorite AI service. The scariest part is that these studies have actually measured reduced cognitive ability “at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” after only a few months of using services like ChatGPT.

These same experts predict that the disempowerment will not only come at the individual level, but also at the societal level, as lawmakers turn their attention and favor even more toward tech companies and AI services that increasingly take over tasks that used to be performed by human beings.

DHS and ICE: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and have been using AI models to power their violent and unpopular immigration raids across the country. They are also surveilling, threatening, and creating databases of protesters.

Part 4: What Next?

The purpose of this article is not to overwhelm with doomsaying or inevitability. If the Deep Fission underground reactor works as advertised, it could genuinely provide cleaner energy than fossil fuel and mitigate some of the effects of climate change. But to get there safely, we need to demand transparency and regulatory protections from political and corporate leaders. If enough of us speak up in place like Parsons, Topeka, Sedgwick County, and every corner of our town, state, country, and world, we embolden those watching, each other, and ourselves to continue building the world we want and deserve.